Harold Ramis on Directing Actors

Cover of Ghostbusters (Widescreen Edition)

Harold Ramis has had an interesting career. First appearing on SCTV (watch the DVD’s if you’ve never seen it) then moving on to directing (Caddyshack, Vacation, Groundhog Day) and acting (Ghostbusters, Stripes, Baby Boom, As Good As It Gets).

His new film is Year One (starring Jack Black and Michael Cera).

He gives an interesting perspective on how to direct and work with actors.

From Movieline:
Year One features a newer generation of talent than that which you’ve generally worked with. How do today’s newer batch of comic stars match up with guys like Bill Murray, Billy Crystal and others with whom you’ve made hits?
They’re great. And Jack’s been around. From the first time I saw him in High Fidelity, he was so good and so convincing that I wasn’t even sure he was a real actor. I thought, “Who is this guy? And how can he be so funny and seem so convinced himself?” And then to hear him play his music at the end of the movie? “Wow, he can sing and play?” Like everyone else in the entertainment word, I started tracking him and was just amazed at how winning he is and how much fun he is to watch. And now he’s done more movies than I have. And Michael, I started noticing him on Arrested Development — he came to that show when he was 13 years old. And I thought, “This kid has a seamless acting style. He’s totally convincing; he’s a total natural. And also funny.” He’s like a grown-up in a teenager’s body.

But when you work with your contemporaries, you tend know their sensibilities and what they’re good at. When you have actors like this, do you find yourself adapting more to their style, or the opposite, or both?
Well, they have this kind of thing where my movies to them were legendary in some way. And I don’t say that in a grandiose way; everyone kind of cherishes the media of their youth. So these guys have this reverence toward those early films, but in the end I’m a person, and they’re people, and their reverence would evaporate really quickly if we were doing a crappy job while we were shooting. So my take is that, as a director, I just have to remember that every actor speaks a different language. It depends on their training, their intellect, their psychology. So many actors are just not introspective. There’s no point in talking to them in a deeply psychological way. Others are completely introspective and require a lot of psychology. Others are completely mechanical; I’ve had some actors say to me, “I only need four directions: Bigger, smaller, faster, slower.” And that’s all they want to hear. Others are very political, and they want to talk about the sociology and the politics of the film and their role in it, or what it represents. I have to be able to speak in all of those modes, and that’s true of any generation.

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